Did God get lucky?

Dan Chapa has responded:

Steve’s first criticism of Molinism is to call it fate and fatalistic, because in Molinism God does not decide what we would freely do in various circumstances.  (link) Steve doesn’t explain why this qualifies as fatalism.  Was the Cowboys selection of Tryon Smith fatalistic just because the first eight players were off the board?  No, just because you don’t decide everything does not mean you cannot decide anything or that the outcome of what you do choose is inevitable.  While God does not determine what we would choose in various circumstances, He does decide the circumstances.  Steve is confusing the inability to determine everything with the inability to determine anything.

i) No, my argument wasn’t based on (the Molinist) God’s inability to determine everything. Rather, my argument was based on Craig’s admission that God doesn’t have an unconstrained choice between two options. Yet critics of Calvinism typically brand Calvinism as “fatalistic” because predestined agents are acting under constraint (i.e. their choices and actions are circumscribed by the decree).

But according to Craig, the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom antecedently constrain God’s freedon of choice:

There may be no world feasible for God involving universal, freely embraced salvation which comes without other overriding disadvantages. Sure, God could have refrained from creating Fred (or both Fred and Sophie), but then the resulting world might have been even worse or at least no better. The hypothesis is that God has done the very best He can, given the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which confront Him.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9193

So God’s options are forced options. But if a Calvinist said human options are forced options, an Arminian would say that’s fatalistic.

ii) In Molinism, God can’t change the outcome. For the counterfactuals of freedom are a given. At most, God can choose which outcome will eventuate.

God doesn’t create possible outcomes. He can only choose between one outcome and another. He can only create the actual outcome. And even then his field of opportunity is further constrained by what’s feasible. Not all possible worlds are feasible worlds.

For God, it’s the luck of the draw. Will the counterfactuals of freedom deal him a winning hand or a losing hand?

Steve’s second criticism of Molinsim is that “So not only must God play the hand he’s been dealt, but he was dealt that hand from a fictitious deck by a fictitious dealer!”  (link) Steve basis this argument on Craig’s statements that “the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which confront Him are outside His control. He has to play with the hand He has been dealt” and on Craig’s denial that abstract objects, like numbers, exist.  But counterfactuals of freedom are not abstract objects like numbers.

i) It’s unclear what Dan means by that. After all, Craig presumably denies the abstract objectivity of numbers future contingents alike. So it’s not as if Craig is contrasting one with the other. 

ii) It’s also unclear whether Dan is making a general statement about Molinism. For instance, Plantinga is also a Molinist, but Plantinga is not a fictionalist. Rather, he seems to espouse the divine ideas tradition that Craig repudiates.

Imagine God has a hypothetical simulator machine and keeps it in your basement.  He puts hypothetical people in it and it spits out scenarios.  The idea of the simulator machine or the idea of its output, the scenarios, may be abstract objects like numbers, but the machine is not.  It’s sitting in your basement.  Steve is confusing God’s thoughts and ability to hypothesize with the concepts of God’s thoughts and ability to hypothesize.

Once again, Dan misinterprets my objection, perhaps because he fails to grasp the underlying issue. If we play along with Craig’s metaphor, the deck of cards would correspond to the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom while the dealer would correspond to the creaturely agents.

But this comparison breaks down. For middle knowledge refers to God’s prevolutional knowledge of what human (or angelic) agents would do in various hypothetical situations, in light of which God instantiates one scenario.

But at this stage of God’s deliberations, there are no actual creatures who embody the counterfactuals of freedom. Their actual existence is the result of God’s decision to instantiate them. As such, there are no property-bearers (=creatures) in whom these properties (=counterfactuals of freedom) inhere.

Since Craig is a fictionalist, he can’t treat possible persons as abstract objects. But if possible persons are nonentities, then what creatures correspond to the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom? What undergirds that claim? What makes it true?

Steve’s third criticism of Molinism is that it’s incoherent to talk about what a person would do if we assume they had a radically different past and were in completely different circumstances, like JFK being born in medieval Tibet.  This assumes there is nothing more to us than our nature, genetics and circumstances.  It’s like we could have an identity swap with another person, so long as that other person had our genetics, memories and upbringing. 

I didn’t say there was nothing more to us than our parentage. The question, rather, is whether there is less to us than our parentage. To be the son of Joseph Kennedy and Rose Kennedy is an intrinsic property of being John F. Kennedy. Unless Joseph Kennedy was his father, JFK would not exist. Unless Rose Kennedy was his mother, JFK wouldn’t exist.

Does Dan seriously think that JFK would still be the same person if Shirley MacLaine was his mother? Is Dan denying historical causation?

Transworld identity is grounded in correspondence to the nearest-possible world. You can’t switch person, place, and period at will and still have transworld identity.

But the bible does talk about what people would do if they had been born in another time, like the Pharisees in Christ time would have killed the OT prophets (Matthew 23:29-32) or what Christ’s servants would do if His kingdom had been of this world (John 18:36).  Such statements are not incoherent, in part because there is such a thing as “us”, over and above our circumstances and genetics.

i) Molinism is an exercise in philosophical theology, with extensive input from modal metaphysics. As such, objections to the coherence of Molinism can’t be trumped by Dan’s Mickey Mouse prooftexting. Craig, Planting, and Flint doesn’t simply quote the Bible whenever they get into a bind. The internal structure of Molinism has to mesh on its own terms.

ii) Dan’s appeal to Scripture is quite one-sided. The Bible often  delineates individuals by reference to their ancestry. So it’s not as if Scripture treats ancestry as incidental to your personal identity.

iii) Mt 23:29-32 is simply a tu quoque argument responding to the Pharisees according to their own claims: “For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, 30saying, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' 31Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.”

Jesus is quoting the scribes and Pharisees, then responding to them in kind. That’s completely different than Jesus himself making a claim about what they’d do had they been born in another time. Jesus isn’t saying, “Even if you had different parents, you’d be the same person.” That goes way beyond the purview of his reply.

iii) Moreover, Dan’s appeal is nonsensical, for your nurture can definitely have an influence on how you turn out. The fact that you murder a prophet because you had one set of parents doesn’t mean you’d murder a prophet if you had a different set of parents.

iv) And even if Jesus was making a statement about what they’d do under those circumstances, that’s a claim about their attitude. And it takes the actual individual as the frame of reference, then imaginatively projects him into a different time or place. It doesn’t start with some counterpart who was born in the past or the future, but with Jesus’ contemporary, along with everything that made him what he is today–at the time he’s having that conversation with Jesus.

v) Dan’s appeal to Jn 18:36 is sloppy. That counterfactual involves an alternate future, not an alternate past. It’s not a different time, but the same time in a different world. His counterfactual envisions a parallel present, where Jesus is still speaking to Pilate in 1C. The servants who fight for him under that scenario have the same ancestors.

This alludes to Peter’s bungled attempt to prevent Jesus from being taken into custody. It’s not Peter born a 100 years earlier to a different mom and dad. In context, the history leading up to the present is the same. That’s not what’s different about this alternate possible world. What’s different is that Jesus has different stake in this alternate possible world.

Steve’s fourth criticism of Molinism is that God’s not determining what we would choose in every setting conflicts with His omnipotence.  Steve even compares William Lane Craig to a Rabbi who’s rejected by Orthodox Jews and popular among Mormans for denying omnipotence.  (link)  The comparison is uncalled for and would be like comparing Calvinists to Hindus with an evil god.  Probably Steve’s argument would look something like God cannot create a rock so big He cannot lift it because the idea of a rock so big God cannot lift is logically impossible.  There’s no such rock, and similarly there’s no such thing as libertarian free will.

But they are not similar. They were dissimilar. To say that God can’t perform a logical contradiction is not a restriction on God’s omnipotence, for that’s a pseudotask. There is nothing for God to do.

By contrast, Molinism really does deny the omnipotence of God. The counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are beyond God’s control. The creature limits the Creator. So, yes, that is, indeed, comparable to Rabbi Kushner’s position. 

But if LFW is impossible, God does not have LFW, as Plantinga points out (see Theism and Persons within Advice to Christian Philosophers).

i) To begin with, that’s a digression from my actual argument. I guess Dan is trying to change the subject to deflect attention away from my actual argument.

ii) In addition, it’s duplicitous of him to invoke divine freedom when it’s Molinism that says God must play the hand he’s been dealt. How does that uphold divine freedom? That’s clearly a severe constraint on divine freedom.

God didn’t create the deck. God didn’t shuffle the deck. God can’t reshuffle the deck. The sequence is whatever it is–despite God's personal preference. It could yield a best-case scenario, worst-case scenario, or something in-between. The Molinist God has to hope and pray and cross his fingers.